The invention herein relates to table card games. More particularly it relates to poker games and apparatus used for the play thereof, and particularly adapted for use in casinos.
In the past there been numerous poker games played in the conventional manner in which the individual players play against each other and where the position of the dealer rotates among the players. Cardhouse/casino poker games may have a house dealer sit in to deal the cards but the dealer is not involved in the game itself, and the players still play only against each other. Conversely there are other games such as Caribbean poker in which each player plays only against the house dealer and the specific hand held by each of the players is of little consequence to the other players. Games in which a player can play simultaneously with a single hand against both a dealer and the other players are seldom found. However, such games are anticipated to be highly popular with players because the games give them the opportunity to have two winnings with each hand, one against the house dealer and the other against the other players.
Similarly, in the past there have been games which have been played with distorted decks of cards, such as games in which one or more cards, card values or card suites are removed from the deck before hands are dealt. Such games are not relevant to the present invention, since the playing of poker requires that all 52 cards be in the deck from which the hands are dealt, so that all of the possible card combinations expected by players in poker games are capable of being dealt from the deck in each hand. (The inclusion of one or two jokers as additional cards in the deck does not alter this requirement. The joker does not diminish the number of natural poker card combinations that can potentially be dealt from the deck, it merely increases the number of ways those combinations can be dealt.) While games utilizing such non-standard decks may be enjoyable to their players, they cannot be considered to be poker or relevant to poker.
There have also long been methods of dealing cards from a deck in sequences other than the randomized card order which follows a thorough shuffle of the deck. Among the most common of these distorted dealing sequences occurs when a dealer deals a card from the bottom of the deck or deals the second card in the deck rather than dealing the first card, i.e., the card on the top of the deck. By using such “crooked deals” dishonest dealers have intended to cheat other players in the card game, such as by providing one or more of the other players with poorer value hands than they would otherwise have had, or by providing a better value hand to one player (usually a confederate of the dealer or a shill for the house) than that player would otherwise have had, all in order to increase the winnings of the dealer, the confederate and/or the house. Since such forms of dealing are intended to cheat players in a game, they are of course also intended to be kept secret from the players who are being cheated. They are also uniformly considered illegal. Therefore, notwithstanding that such forms of dealing might theoretically be labeled as “biased,” they are not relevant to the “biased deal” concept included in the present invention, where the purpose is to enhance the overall opportunities for all of the players in a poker game and the nature and presence of the biased dealing are known to all players and are considered by the players to be both essential and desired.